Give YouTube Users Tools to Combat Video Spam

With the recent uprising of the Anti-ReplyGirls movement, it has become apparent that YouTube users are in need of tools to combat what they consider video spam.

Fortunately, the movement's cause is not unjustified or just baseless complaining. According to the Google/YouTube TOS Community Guidelines, "Everyone hates spam. Do not create misleading descriptions, tags, titles or thumbnails in order to increase views. It's not OK to post large amounts of untargeted, unwanted or repetitive content, including comments and private messages."

So rather than attacking the ReplyGirl phenomena directly, we are asking for a set of tools that would be useful for the YouTube community as a whole. These suggestions have been collected from the community where the majority of the movement grew from:

Suggestion One:

Remove videos from the related links that have a 75% or more dislikes after 1000 votes.

This is not designed to remove the content from YouTube entirely, but to prevent things that the community feels is not worthy of showing up in relation to a particular video. This would help to cut down on frustrated members having to see breasts shoved into their faces constantly by the related video bar. Some of the community watchers are underage, and to have blatantly sexual content bombarded at them is inappropriate.

Suggestion Two:

Allow registered users to block content from an entire channel to prevent it from appearing within the related videos section.

This would cut down on the spam considerably. If people hate these channels so much, then they shouldn't have to be force subjected to them. Merely visiting these channels and down-voting them also skews the statistics and carries them further up into the related videos where they are not desired. If we cut it off at the source by not visiting them and blocking the channels personally, we will be able to see a rise in the real valued content on YouTube, and the users (your customers) will have an overall more enjoyable experience. Likewise, you won't face a poor public reputation when you fail to deal appropriately with these issues.

Suggestion Three:

Allow the hiding of video tags to prevent them from being copied and spammed into reply videos.

Tags allow users to search for content related to a particular topic and also function to bring up related videos where users have added their own similar tags for similar content. Tags shouldn't be able to be copied en masse in order to make use of loopholes in the YouTube system to get views on content unrelated to the currently viewed content. As pointed out, this is "untargeted," and "unwanted."

Suggestion Four:

Allow users to create personal search filters that will remove videos appearing in the search and related videos section that contain those filtered words.

This will allow users to more deeply control the content that they are exposed to. For example: if I don't want to see particular videos ever, I just add the word "Re" or "snowboarding" (arbitrary choice for fairness) into my filter, and the next time I search, these types of videos won't show up for me. It would be a great addition to not only the related videos section, but also the overall search function.

Suggestions Five:

Blocking a user should prevent their content (videos) from appearing in the search and related videos to individual users.

This is something that should be expected. Why it is not already a part of the YouTube system is beyond comprehension. Usually there is a reason for blocking an individual, so why does their content still show up as related suggestions when it's clear one doesn't want to have anything to do with them?

Keep in mind that these are tool recommendations and not set in stone. What Google decides to do with these suggestions is up to them. However, through the communities visited, the number two suggestion was the most commonly quoted, and probably the best solution in this situation.